Observe these royal honeys…
… clearing for themselves a path through the urban jungle. They live in danger, but know that the going rate on barrels of testosterone, like OPEC oil, has priced most men right out of the game.
In researching for the Slant dance list (or rather buttressing my take that, as far as disco is concerned, blacker and looser equaled better), I ended up paging through Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, which jumped right into the thick of a well-tred social scene-setting that anyone misguided enough to take disco music seriously against pig-headed rockists is no doubt overly familiar with.
Disco was the height of glamour and indulgence. But while disco may have sparkled with diamond brilliance, it stank of something far worse. Despite its veneer of elegance and sophistication, disco was born, maggot-like, from the rotten remains of the Big Apple.
I know, you’re all “tell me something I don’t know. The term papers humping this vamp number in the thousands, as many per semester as there are beats per minute.” I admit that I am still reactively resistant to this critical model on account of there doesn’t need to be an overt reason to allow rockism to dictate the ground rules of the debate. In other words, just because any number of musically-circumspect rock artists have been critically baptized by their political prickliness doesn’t mean we have to listen to Chic’s breezy “Le Freak” and mentally redress their revision of the original title refrain (aimed at the scenesters of Studio 54) and switch it back to “Fuck Off.” Even if it’s true. Disco was born on streets you wouldn’t walk down at midnight, but the music itself was a transcendent, escapist trip uptown. The worst disco denied the former (robots can’t get track marks, y’know), but even stuff like Baccara could be validated by its campy otherworldliness.
Still, sucker for sexual subtext anyway I can get it, I can’t totally dismiss the earmarks of where Shapiro, et al, are really aiming when they dissect disco by defining it (and New York) against its own backlash (and Chicago/Detroit, ironically the nexus of disco’s rebirth, but that’s another story).
To fully comprehend New York in the seventies, it’s necessary to look at where the previous decade and its progressive agenda fell off course. The liberal experiment of the 1960s was fueled by the youthful enthusiasm and swaggering confidence of a generation that had never known anything but the greatest prosperity the world had ever seen. But as soon as the economic conditions that had made the Great Society possible started to falter, the dreams turned into disillusionment, the promises became retractions, and the sweeping vision became blinkered and myopic…
And New York was the Ground Zero (Shapiro talks extensively of the Bronx going up in flames during the ‘77 World Series), as it appeared to retain its Maude Findlay pose of liberal defiance even as other cities went up in student uprisings and race riots while the Archie Bunkers stroked their ire. I understand how disco could trigger a Lacanian sort of reaction from the Bunkers, an outrage not so much that society was unravelling on their behalf, but that they could actually have the gall to apparently enjoy themselves despite the creeping debasement.
Obviously the tension all leads up to Steve Dahl’s over-documented Disco Demolition Derby at Comiskey Park in ‘79. But even here Shapiro manages to put a wickedly incisive edge to his take on the patently obvious psychosexual significance of the event and what, exactly, was at stake for the American beergut male and his precious AOR. (I apologize for the extensiveness of the following quote but, even between ellipses, the guy’s on a well-researched roll.)
Despite [Anita Bryant's] efforts, it was Steve Dahl and his foot soldiers—even though they were the ones who desecrated the altar—who managed to have the most visible flowering of gay liberation excommunicated from the church of American popular culture. It wasn’t just deviant sexuality, though, that rankled the straight white male of the Midwest. It was something far worse: impotence. Detroit had once been the shining industrial beacon of the American economic miracle… and the images of third-generation Germans, Jews, recent Polish immigrants, and newly arrived African Americans from the Deep South working side-by-side on the shop floor were enduring symbols of both the might and the beneficence of American capitalism. In the face of the gasoline crises of 1973 and 1979, and with a tsunami of cheap Japanese cars flooding the country, Motor City was in deep trouble. In the freezing winter of 1976-77, the electric company was forced to cut voltage throughout the state of Michigan, “dimming lights and darkening moods,” as historian Bruce Schulman put it. The beacon was shining no more… Inflation was running rampant, exacerbated by OPEC price increases, and President Carter seemed powerless to do anything about it… The ultimate humiliation, though, occurred on November 4, 1979, when Fundamentalist Muslim students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took its sixty-six occupants hostage. America’s might had not only been questioned but openly mocked by a country that had escaped feudalism a mere twenty-five years earlier. With its mincing campiness, air-brushed superficiality, limp rhythms, flaccid guitars, fey strings, and overproduced sterility, disco seemed emblematic of America’s dwindling power. The high falsettos of disco stars like the Bee Gees and Sylvester sounded the death knell for the virility of the American male. Disco came from New York, “Sodom on the Hudson,” the home of both namby-pamby knee-jerk liberals and Spiro Agnew’s “Northeast liberal media elite.” Viewed in this context, Dahl’s military pomp makes a bit of sense: He was waging war on the enemy within that was draining America of its life force.
So what the backlash against disco was really fueled by wasn’t straight-up homophobia (though I notice that Shapiro didn’t make mention of any queens down there on the Detroit assembly lines) but an honest sense of betrayal. Disco was a genre created by and in celebration of women, non-whites, and guys who could swivel their hips every direction on the compass… or at the very least had no trouble finding them as they weren’t hiding behind rolls of fat. And from the ashes of disco’s demise was born a more organized civil rights movement in defense of the newly-debased straight white male. And the scorched land of what used to be Oz has proven mighty fertile for non-SWM cultural studies majors.
And, apparently, Noo Yawk filmmakers. And, by extension, pop culture junkies like me for whom the New York of the Ford/Carter years is as much an iconic “setting” for films as Nero’s Rome, Hitler’s Europe or San Fernando’s pool-cleaning service trucks. What’s especially gratifying is how intrinsically linked the disco scene is with the grindhouse circuit, in more elusive ways than simple temporal concern. Spike Lee’s 22nd anniversary disco v. punk epic Summer of Sam probably gets disco more right than punk, but it’s the only other film of his that rivals Do the Right Thing (and maybe School Daze) for effectively conveying a fully-conceived microcosmic world, and it remains his most unjustly underrated movie. But Abel Ferrara’s 1981 castration parable Ms. 45 was practically contemporaneous; the curdled stench of an army of blue balls hangs throughout the film like serrated limbs dripping juice into a refrigerator’s crisper. And Ferrara’s directorial flamboyance, pitching the film somewhere between Carrie and Death Wish, would appear to be a mask…
… behind which is lurking a wounded prick-ego. Ms. 45 is not, as Meathead cinephiles would have you believe, a “feminist” “vigilante” “fantasy” but rather an irrational excoriation of a sexual waking nightmare, directed by what one headlining NY Catholic filmmaker would probably label an underground, scuzzball NY Catholic filmmaking smuggler with a diseased mind but a healthy sense of humor. Zoë Tamerlis’ mute title character, a rape victim who turns two consecutive rapes into a murderous rampage against Manhattan’s entire male demographic, isn’t mute because she’s been silenced by victimization. Hell no, not in this film. (A quarter-hour in and she’s dragging a body into her apartment bathtub and using a Wüsthof hacksaw for some creative resizing.) No, she’s mute because she’s an ice cold bitch who doesn’t have time for you or any other man. Clearly this isn’t a proto Thelma & Louise. It’s not even a Lady Taxi Driver, with or without a soundtrack by Prince. (You know, the guy who made female orgasms in “Automatic” sound like Hell’s maternity ward?) Though Travis Bickle has less personal stock in cleaning up the streets, Zoë’s Thana only earns the designation “antihero” for about ten minutes before Ferrara attacks her credibility as a crusader in that, even in excepting the two rapists and maybe even the pimp, none of Thana’s victims actually deserve what’s coming to them. At least not in a retributive, cause-effect way, as the film’s most famous scene finds Thana cooly picking off an encircled gang of thugs that could’ve perhaps been rapists, but we’ll never know because of her preemptive extermination. This is Thelma and Ms. Hyde.
(An obligatory post-Brokeheart Mountain Oscar aside: 1976’s Network might retroactively serve us well as a more “respectable” early rallying cry on behalf of crusty old virility were it not for the fact that it was written from the defensive position of a Jewish, New York intellectual and his formidable ivory tower eight-syllabled words. So, naturally, it lost Best Picture to Rocky. Annie Hall came back swinging the following year against Star Wars, but by the time The Deer Hunter KO-ed Coming Home the year after that, the writing was clearly on the wall. The two-barreled reaffirmation of the male, however reborn with newfound sensitivity, as the pillar of the nuclear family unit in Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People explains itself.)
I could go through the film’s scenes one-by-one and examine their iconography, but… c’mon. It’s not like this insight is only available to the privileged few who are sensitive or female (impossible to be both in Ferrara’s world) enough to see it…
Ms. 45 is great not because of its level of insight but because of Ferrara’s candor and how committed he is to presenting his uncensored bad faith in the imbalance of sexual power as he saw it. (Poor, aboveground Brian De Palma was never allowed the same level of relative anonymity to admit that Dressed to Kill was born, more or less, from the same set of sour nuts.) The signposts to his machismic discontent hardly need unpacking.
Let’s see, the bustling workplace is winnowed down to the garment district, a racket in which the woman department store buyer calls the shots and even (apparently) straight designer Svengalis have to fake gay to command any respect. Hello, economic impotence!
(Speaking of economic neutering, after one of Thana(topsis)’s deadlier nights, a radio news announcer switches from her victims to the city’s impending sanitation strike, bringing up the moment the city almost drowned in its own trash and shit.)
Thana’s nosy landlord is Studio 54 refuse incarnate. Ms. 54?
When Thana and her garment room workmates all go out for lunch, they get schmoozed by a fashion photographer who looks more like Cousin Larry.
He’s hardly dressing any of them down. He’s a horny gnat. And what does the Alpha Female (whose ready position with a knife towards the end of the film is too good to spoil here) do to him?
Thana allows him to take her to his studio, where she doesn’t even step out of the elevator. Just locks and loads.
Funny, the last time I saw a photographer’s paper backdrop so mistreated, the only thing being spilled was Candy Darling’s dignity, as well as Candy herself.
Yet another case of the SWM claiming the rhetoric and strategies of the previously disenfranchised as his own to demonstrate his status as a minority, I guess. Personally, I’m more receptive when the argument comes in the form of a sweet-natured, Bowser-esque greaser throwback…
… who catcalls women from the corner but whose got a heart as taut and perky as the ass in his skin-tight high-water jeans, which even he can’t keep his hands off of (though the gait suggests he’s just in a perpetual state of readjustment).
By far the most attractive character in the entire film, Ducktail’s completely unjust death at the losing end of Thana’s .45 (immortalized in the final montage of the seminal “greatest hits of post-Sputnik horror movies” Terror in the Aisles) reveals Ferrara’s hand… delivering an open-handed slap in the face to every uppity woman who ever told him to buzz off. And if his kiss off were music, it’d probably sound like the corny sleaze groove at the climactic Halloween party, confidently aggressive but still confused about exactly what it’s saying. Or, rather, what instrument it’s playing.
A final note on cats and dogs. Of course one represents pussy and the other represents leg-humping masculinity. The pathetic cuckold Thana picks up in the singles bar explains that, upon catching his wife cheating on him with another woman (as to why he’s not immediately turned on by the discovery, I guess it’s a case of “you had to be there”), he turned around and strangled her cat. Thana later tries to kill her landlady’s all-yapping, all-sleuthing pooch but (in the film’s final twist of irony apparently meant to give Thana a tinge of humanity) ultimately can’t. I have to admit that this entire blog entry (written in conjunction with the Ferrara blogpile) probably wouldn’t have ever been written if my friend Steve hadn’t royally fucked up last week while in New York. While strolling in Central Park and talking to his father on his cell, Steve claims he spotted Abel Ferrara walking his poodle. (!) If he hadn’t been a dipshit and asked his father to hold while he preserved the moment on his borrowed digital camera, I would’ve just posted that delicious image here and called it art. Instead, I have to just take a guess and approximate the now-becalmed, domestic Abel taking his dog out for a little promenade.
What’s in the purse? Don’t ask.